The Never Ending Story

Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) in the late afternoon

Northern Territory February 2001 (6 images)

There used to be a travel slogan “You’ll never never know, if you never never go” to promote travel to outback Northern Territory, a region often colloquially referred to as “the never never”. And so with a few days off work coming up, back on Valentine’s Day 2001 I checked the internet for somewhere in Australia that I’d never been to before, with nice weather for that time of the year. Cairns was my preferred destination but it was raining there. So I called up my travel agent at 2pm:

Me: Hope you’re having a nice day. Special plans tonight?

Her: Yes, having a nice dinner out with my husband.

Me: Good. I want to go to central Northern Territory for 4 days as there will be some nice weather there.

Her: Sure, when would you like to go?

Me: First thing tomorrow morning …please. I need the following…

Her: *Gulp*. Tomorrow? Seriously… Ohhhhhhh Kayyyyy…..

To her credit, she got back to me in 2 hours with an itinerary and bookings, and I made it there (It didn’t go entirely smoothly, but that was to be expected). It’s a fascinating place, and travelling on my own and being in the off season, I could take my time and explore without the crowds or hurried timetable of group tours. I could drive and explore for hours and not see another person.

Kata tjuta (The Olgas) in the evening

Over at the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge, the topic is Infinite . The outback is a vast infinite place, of infinite beauty and where I truly experienced infinity. It really is a never ending story in the Northern Territory and I guess, that’s why I’ve been back 3 times now, to different areas of it, although these days I do my own planning and bookings via the internet. 🙂

George Gill Range

From atop the Kings Canyon

Looking towards Mount Conner

In case you’re wondering, back in 2001 I was using my very first digital camera, a Canon IXUS 2MP camera and shooting happily in jpeg (I had no idea what raw files were back then). All these images are approximately 600KB in original size. I’ve used lightroom, nik and topaz to try and bring them up to date. My apologies that these are not as sharp and detailed as they would be with a modern digital camera.

Uluru in the morning.

This was one of my primitive photo stitches, one of the functions of the Canon software which infinitely fascinated me. I’d stand in one spot (yes, no tripod) and swivel around ensuring there was enough overlap of the images to work with. I was easily amused in those days. 🙂